Manuscripts are the most primary sources in biblical studies. There are over 5,600 Greek copies of the New Testament alone, produced from the second to the nineteenth centuries—a real treasure trove. Yet for most New Testament scholars, manuscripts play little role in how we think about our work, interpret texts, or conceive of what the New Testament is. When we get behind our editions and printed Bibles, we open a new world of interpretive and historical possibilities.
See Words are Not Enough: Paratexts, Manuscripts, and the Real New Testament (Eerdmans 2024).
By Garrick V. Allen
School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow
December 2024
The Hidden Labor Behind the Bible
When we pick up a modern Bible in English we hold in our hands the product of thousands of hours of painstaking work by hundreds of mostly anonymous people. These include press employees like editors, advisory boards, printers, typesetters, copyeditors, proofreaders, illustrators, and indexers who had a hand in putting together any specific edition of the Bible. They ensure a quality end-of-the-line product that actual people will buy and use.
New editions of the Bible also often draw upon existing translations usually produced by a committee of scholars. This is time-consuming, technical, methodical work that relies on countless of hours of training and study. But even translators stand on the shoulders of giants.
Before a solitary jot of the New Testament can be rendered into English, the Greek text to be translated must be determined. The text of each manuscript differs from all others, even if in small-scale ways, and translators must choose which form to use as the base for their new product. This is the work of textual critics: sifting the texts of hundreds of manuscripts, using various criteria to make an informed guess about the earliest recoverable text at each point of variation. These decisions are then set forth in critical editions, which translators use to make the vernacular Bible you can find on your grandmother’s coffee table or at the local book shop.
We spend a lot of time and effort making it possible for people to read the Bible in their own language, without ever looking at or thinking about the manuscripts that lie behind the book we hold in our hands. Critical editions and modern Bibles distil the tradition. In the process, these products of print culture necessarily omit many details about the manuscripts that stand behind our portrait of the Bible.
Even the most maximal edition of the New Testament—the recent Editio Critica Maior—offers access to only a percentage of the textual variation present in the tradition, by rule only the most germane to thinking about the New Testament’s earliest text. There is a decade’s long, energetic process of scholarship in the background that makes it possible for us to read the Bible without any knowledge of its original languages or its manuscripts. This process makes some historical sense, necessitated by the fact that until recently very few people ever had the chance to glimpse a manuscript, not to mention the fact that no one speaks Koine Greek.
But we are in a very different situation today, at least when it comes to the manuscripts. Anyone with an internet connection can access hundreds of thousands of pages of manuscript images. Most major libraries have online viewers, like Gallica, DigiVatLib, or the Chester Beatty viewer (among many others). And there are an ever growing number of sites for scholars, like the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, where anyone can access images of large swathes of the manuscripts that have been the realm of the text critics. Some special manuscripts, like Codex Sinaiticus, even have their own sites, complete with transcription and translation. Even some particularly interesting chapters (Mark 16, for example) have their own resources.
Scholars are now in a position to begin to use editions as tools for interrogating the manuscripts instead of as tools to avoid them.
New Possibilities
Because we now have greater access to manuscript images, we can begin to ask new questions beyond the purely textual. What do we learn when we peak behind the curtain? What happens when we look at the manuscripts with new eyes?
The answers to these questions are legion. As handmade, bespoke, textual artefacts, manuscripts are highly complex works of human craftsmanship and expertise. Like works of art they are highly replete, irreducible to summary and description. For biblical scholars this is all great news: there’s much more work to be done with the thousands of manuscripts that our discipline has only begun to explore.
Paratexts
Because the potential avenues for thinking about the manuscripts anew are numerous, I want to focus in on what we learn when we look at one of set of their features that exist in some form in every copy, but which are often overlooked or taken for granted: paratexts.
Paratext, a term coined by French literary critic Gérard Genette in the 1980s, refers to everything beyond the main text itself. Modern Bibles and critical editions have their own complex paratextual machinery, things like prefaces, chapters and verses, subtitles, footnotes, commentary, page numbers, indexes, and so on. Paratexts are common to nearly all literatures ancient and modern. Every book you pick up has paratexts, some more complicated and meaningful than others.
Paratexts help us navigate through the book, shape and segment the text, frame our interpretations, and draw our attention to specific aspects of whatever it is we’re reading. They are the hidden forces, the secret thresholds that negotiate between text and reader. Often these features are shadows of the paratexts found in the manuscripts.
The Euthalian Paratextual System
Scholars are beginning to pay attention to the paratexts that accompany the New Testament’s manucripts, especially its complex transmitted systems. For example, in recent years, multiple books have explored the Eusebian canon table system to the gospels, a set of text divisions, cross-reference tables, and a preface on how to copy out and use the system called the Letter to Carpianus. (See the work of Martin Wallraff, Matthew Crawford, and Jeremiah Coogan, for example.) Composed by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, the Eusebian system appears in hundreds of gospel manuscripts. In a period before our modern chapter and verses were invented, Eusebius created a way to segments the text of each gospel while creating pathways for reading in non-linear ways, flipping between and comparing parallel passages.
The poor cousin of the Eusebian system for the gospels is the Euthalian apparatus for Acts, the Catholic Epistles, and Pauline letters. Appearing in over 600 Greek manuscripts, the Euthalian apparatus is complex. It includes prologues for each group of works, individual prefaces for each work, chapter lists for each work, two lists of quotations (often coordinated with marginal annotations in the text itself), various short texts on Paul’s biography and travels, and a “lection” list that divides each text up into three units of varying length.
None of the Euthalian features were written by the New Testament’s authors. They are the products of a generative tradition, one that reveals a significant number of highly interested (mostly anonymous) scribes, intellectuals, and readers who initially crafted and then assiduously re-copied these features for about a millennium.
These features are important in part because of their omnipresence for most readers in the Greek tradition (and many other ancient languages). But, at least for me, their primary value lies in the ways they influenced readers.
GA 1845
Take the preface (hypothesis) to Acts for example. It exists in over 150 manuscripts, but let’s consider it in GA 1845 (Vatican City, Vat.gr. 1971; diktyon 68600), a tenth century copy of Acts, the Catholic Epistles, and Paul’s Letters that includes numerous Euthalian elements. The hypothesis begins on 36r, following the prologue, lection list, and quotation lists. It contains a very short description of Acts’ narrative, but it is primarily comprised of two lists: a list of disciples (drawn from Acts 1:13–26 and 6:1–6) and a list of miracles.
These lists, produced through a close reading of the details of Acts, influence our attention. The hypothesis to Acts doesn’t help us to keep the uneven plot of Acts straight, but it does prime us to look out for minor characters and their roles and to pay attention miraculous reports. These lists suggest that plot is not the primary things to keep in mind when reading Acts; we should be keeping a keen eye on the characters and their actions that collapse the heavenly and earthly realms.
The other Euthalian material in GA 1845 also has similar effects on readers who are open to their influence. The quotation lists attune readers to the multiple Jewish scriptural texts explicitly referenced in Acts, reinforced by the presence of annotations in the margins that give information on the sources of these quotations. And the presence of the lection lists, which splits the text of Acts up into three sets of divisions (readings, chapters, and lines), and two different chapter lists before Acts highlights the fundamental instability in the way we divide its sections and understand its narrative shape.
Similar realities occur in both predictable and idiosyncratic ways in thousands of manuscripts. Each is a unique representation of the broader tradition. In addition to thinking about how paratexts influence readers in various circumstances, the manuscripts point up the fact that the New Testament is not an idealised or inevitable collection. It is in many ways the product of thousands of anonymous people who valued its works and their message, who worked to make this material accessible to their friends, families, flocks, and future generations.
When we look at the manuscripts, we glimpse the hidden work behind our modern Bibles. More importantly, the manuscripts offer space to begin to read empathetically with the lost people of the past who made it possible for us to pick up a Bible and to think about its essential substance, historical process, and complex meaning. Without paratexts there is no Bible.